To address the original question...Legalise Drugs?
Yes. For the user only. The user needs help, not prosecution.
But NOT for the pusher, NOT for the one who manufactures and markets it.
Where would the user find most harmful drugs, without the pusher?
The only drug I know of that's so easy to make that any fool can do it very simply in his own home is marijuana, and if someone wants to grow his own marijuana or brew his own beer for his own consumption, it's nobody's business but his. If he creates a big organisation, puts the drug in a fancy package, and advertises it on the public media, and sells it to millions of vulnerable and often unsuspecting people, then it bloody well IS society's business.
Drug users are not criminals, per se, although they are often people with a serious emotional problem...(which sometimes can lead to crime).
On the other hand, people who knowingly market drugs in order to profit on someone else's weakness are essentially criminals, as far as I'm concerned. I include in that estimation many presently legal industries, like the tobacco companies, and in some cases the pharmaceutical companies, as well as pushers of illegal drugs. Casinos are also in the business of marketing an addiction...but of a different sort.
Drug users often become unstable and then commit crimes or antisocial acts that affect others...in that case, prosecute them for the act, not the drug. How hard can that be to figure out? I knew hundreds of young adults in the early seventies who indulged casually in various illegal drugs, and most of them were utterly harmless people. It would have been ludicrous to prosecute any of them under the circumstances, since they were not hurting anyone, except possibly (in a few cases) themselves, and that was usually hurt on a fairly trivial basis.
The people who MUST be controlled are the large organizations which profit from mass marketing of drugs. As long as they run loose in this world, you will never make any real progress by harassing the users. It's the pushers you've got to stop.
If I or anyone else should take a drug (pick any one of hundreds, both legal and illegal)...and then commit no antisocial act whatsoever as a result...then it's nobody else's business. People have a right to govern their own lives, as long as they don't hurt others. As far as hurting themselves...well, if you love them, you can give them good advice, but at the end of the day they will decide what to do to themselves. Who among us has not indulged in something at some time that someone else was wise enough to avoid indulging in? You wanna stop all of that? Arrest EVERYBODY and lock 'em up in isolation tanks. They will finally die safely without having done anything you disapprove of or consider unconventional according to whatever is your notion of conventionality.
The real reason you see the law always coming down on the Little Guy (the user)...instead of on the BIG GUY who mass markets the drugs is simply this: MONEY TALKS. The marketers have lots of money and lots of influence and friends in high places...and the users don't. It's easy to beat up on the powerless.
"Steal a little and they throw you in jail, Steal a lot and they make you a king." - Bob Dylan
Besides, this whole damned society is based on addiction! What do you think commercial advertising is all about? Addiction (emotional or physical) sells product! Ever hear of "shopping addiction"? It's far more common than illegal drug use.
Prosecuting drug users is, again, a distraction, a side issue, a "motherhood" issue. It sounds good, but it arises from a state of denial which does not even begin to address the deep systemic problems that lie at the heart of this whole money-corrupted society.
- LH